Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote, among much else:
> I think the problem has been taken by the wrong end. Really, the UCS > namespace of characters has *never* been designed to allow any custom > alias. In other words, what Perl did, by adding those custom aliases, > was clearly not conforming to the standard. > > What Perl should have used is not reusing the same property to > reference both the standard names (or aliases) and its own custom > aliases (even if those aliases are needed and widely known). I don't know if this was what Philippe had in mind, but it reminded me of a situation in the world of language tagging. Apparently ISO 639-3/RA got a request, from an individual associated with a Very Well-Known Web Site, to change the 639-3 code element for the Wawa language from 'www' to something else. Turns out that the site uses language codes in its URLs to link to different language versions: - www.example.org links to the generic site - en.example.org links to the English-language site - fr.example.org links to the French-language site And they wanted to have a site in Wawa, and encountered a name collision. The problem was not the ISO 639-3 had used a TLA that might have been used in some other computer-related context, but rather that the Well-Known Site chose to use the same namespace both for the generic 'www' portion of a URL and for individual language codes -- "reusing the same property," in a way. The assumption was that no collision would ever occur because a language code of 'www' would never exist, which may have made sense before 3-letter language codes existed, but that was quite a long time ago. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell
